Recording, production, mixing and mastering in Leith
I make records with people.
Everyone offers “a full suite of recording, mixing and mastering services”. Everyone says they’re professional and relaxed and get great results. None of it is a lie and none of it is information.
Here’s the thing: the technical side of this game is pretty well solved. Anyone sufficiently stubborn can learn to make a good recording and mix it. Plenty of people have. There are at least half a dozen rooms in this city that will do it well and I will happily give you their details.
I’m not really selling studio time. Or not just studio time.
What I am interested in has to do with the other side, the unsolved. Feeling which take is the true one. Knowing when to leave the mistake in. Getting to what the song wants. Offering the suggestion that sounds mad when said out loud. Dissolving the creative challenge. Actually getting the thing done. And then heard.
“Jack’s gift lies in his listening. He swims around in the DNA of even the simplest, hastily recorded phone demo and somehow comes back with a pearl. He has that rare production talent: knowing what’s best for the song.”
Angus Gunn
So here are the things I actually do, which are harder to put out there than “full suite of services” because they commit me to something.
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01
I listen to what you’ve made before you arrive.
Not just the demo that you send. As much as you will let me have or that’s out there. It is not billable and it is not efficient. It is why sessions with me start fast, flow and result in recordings that sound like you hoped.
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02
The work sometimes isn’t the work.
Talking, playing each other records, trying another angle. Sometimes what looks like the most expensive hour of the day is the cheapest.
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03
I will do the work to understand your truth and tell you the truth as I hear it.
I have faith in my taste and my ability to communicate musical ideas. After all, this is most of what “music production” actually is (outside the technical matter of pointing mics). You might find yourself paying to be lied to elsewhere, because agreeing with the client is easier and gets you paid the same.
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04
I will suggest the strange thing.
A pianist told me she was going to see her grandad that afternoon. I asked her to record some of it, anything, kettle noise, talking. The recordings became a texture on the track and the track ended up on Nils Frahm’s Piano Day compilation. That idea took eleven seconds to have and cost nothing, and no equipment list on earth would have produced it.
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05
I will fly the spaceship.
The studio is a spaceship. And I know how to fly it because I helped build it. Dave, Fergus and I built LostOsc in 2015 and have been down here like mad scientists ever since. Dante networks, ethernet connections between the rooms, Dolby Atmos, interfaces, all the different ways to patch it. We even wired the plugs. I meticulously take care of the technical so you can focus on the performance.
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06
I know what happens after, and take it seriously.
I have watched countless hundreds of releases go out and paid close attention to why some stick and most do not. Finishing a recording is not the end of the road, and pretending otherwise is how good records disappear. I often end up spending some time with my clients on release strategy, social media, playlisting and the rest of it. (See also Why We Film.)
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07
I play.
I am a multi-instrumentalist and can quickly sketch out a musical idea rather than describe it, in a way that keeps the work moving. I have contributed guitar, bass, piano, percussion, drums, vocals, sampler, synths, trombones, mandolin etc etc etc to clients’ recordings over the years.
Two smaller things, mentioned once and then never again: if you would rather learn the craft than buy it, I teach production one to one on the same gear, always on your own projects. And I have played bass for twenty years, and will do so at any opportunity — I teach bass through The Leith Bass Space.
